According to economic theory, elderly homeowners should be much more eager than they actually are to adopt financial instruments allowing them to borrow against home equity. This paper investigates the determinants of interest for the Italian elderly in one such instrument, the reverse mortgage....

In this paper we evaluate the expected evolution of the Trattamento di ?ne rapporto over the Italian employees?working life careers. We use adiminstrative (INPS) data to disentangle the amount that is expected to be accumulated until retirement, the amount expected not to accrue because of...

In an increasingly risky and globalized marketplace, people must be able to make well-informed financial decisions. Yet new international research demonstrates that financial illiteracy is widespread when financial markets are well developed as in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Japan, Italy,...

Using micro data on Japanese households, I provide an overview of the level of financial literacy in Japan, analyze the determinants of financial literacy and link financial literacy to retirement planning. Overall, the level of financial literacy is low in Japan. Surprisingly, many Japanese...

We examine financial literacy in the United States using the new National Financial Capability Study, wherein we demonstrate that financial literacy is particularly low among the young, women, and the less-educated. Moreover, Hispanics and African-Americans score the least well on financial...

This paper examines households’ financial fragility by looking at their capacity to come up with $2,000 in 30 days. Using data from the 2009 TNS Global Economic Crisis survey, we document widespread financial weakness in the United States: Almost half of Americans report that they are...

The paper discusses the Italian experience in developing its system of private, supplementary pensions, as a case study of the implementation of nation-wide auto-enrolment mechanisms; in the discussion, attention is devoted to pension awareness issues. Auto-enrolment (i.e. the automatic...

This paper studies the impact of immigration on the Italian labor market using administrative data on Italian private-sector employees during the period 1987-2004. The analysis adopts a structural model based on a three level CES production function extending the model in Card (2001) in order to...

The low level of financial literacy in many countries suggests that households are at risk of sub-optimal financial decisions. In this paper we assess to what extent financial advisors can substitute for such a lack of knowledge, by analyzing the effect of investors’ financial literacy on...

A growing body of literature shows that nancial literacy aects household savings and investment choices. Less attention has, however, been devoted to its eect on debt behaviour. This paper contributes to lling this gap by considering how nancial literacy in uences household attitudes with...